


Fire is the Test of Gold

by ariadne_bee



Category: Loki: Agent of Asgard
Genre: Apologies, Being a hero, Friendship, Gen, God of What Now?, Identity Issues, Not being a hero
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2015-05-08
Packaged: 2018-03-29 15:18:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3901087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadne_bee/pseuds/ariadne_bee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p class="p1">Loki apologizes for being a hero. Verity is surprised. (Takes place immediately post-issue #9, but diverging before #10.)
</p><p class="p1"><i>“Thought I would stop by on my way home from the moon to apologize for the immensely shitty person I have been lately.”</i><br/>
<br/>
<i>He wasn’t lying. Which seemed pretty unlikely, frankly, not only because he was claiming to be on his way home from the moon, but also because he was Loki. “Well. I’m not going to contradict you.”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire is the Test of Gold

**Author's Note:**

> _“Fire is the test of gold; adversity of friendship.” – Seneca_

Even the knock at the door sounded kind of defeated, Verity thought later. 

She swung open her front door and found the person she least (most) wanted to see standing there, looking bedraggled, his tacky-ass white-and-green costume smudged up with dirt as though he’d been rolling on the ground, his hair a tangled-up mess, his eyes downcast. 

Verity had seen through a lot of bullshit in her life, and frankly, she was tired of it. She was tired of it from strangers in the street, tired of it from people she was forced to interact with, and most of all, tired of it from this one person, who was supposed to be her friend. Especially when he didn’t even think that his smarmy condescending attitude was, in fact, bullshit.

“What do you want.” It wasn’t really a question; Verity didn’t want to hear an answer, because she knew he’d be lying. It was just what she was supposed to say. 

She waited for him to spin out whatever he’d been rehearsing, whatever song and dance he thought would win back her favor this time. For him to pick up his head and shoot her that easy smile that he thought would always melt her resolve to stay angry.

But his head stayed tilted downward, eyes on the door sill that divided the ratty carpet in her living room from the ratty carpet in the hall. “Thought I would stop by on my way home from the moon to apologize for the immensely shitty person I have been lately.”

He wasn’t lying. Which seemed pretty unlikely, frankly, not only because he was claiming to be on his way home from the _moon,_ but also because he was _Loki._ “Well. I’m not going to contradict you.”

She expected him to shuffle his feet, or shift his weight; maybe fidget or rub at his neck – anything to telegraph the moment he began to try and weasel his way out of this one. Instead, he stayed still, nearly motionless except for the small movement of his fingers, chipping the black polish off one thumbnail. 

“I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice. “I have been utterly insufferable and inexcusably condescending. I was an idiot. I thought I was better than you, better than nearly everyone, and had the gall to tell you so, when in reality, I am better than no one at all. I am lowest of the low. I am Loki,” he said, pronouncing his own name as though it was a curse, “and I should know better than to forget that.”

Verity was getting increasingly confused, which she intensely disliked. “So you’re Loki,” she said. “You’ve always been Loki, as long as I’ve known you – even when you’re not,” she added, thinking of the times she’d seen him shift his form. “And you’ve always tried to be good.”

The word seemed to make him almost flinch. “I have always been Loki,” he agreed, still not looking up at her. “Even when I was not. And no matter what I do, I will always become Loki, and it seems nothing I can ever do will change that fact.”

Her head was starting to hurt, between her sixth sense struggling with the fact that he was telling the truth – or what he believed to be true, anyway – and the way Loki was shifting tenses from past to present and none of it was making any sense. Verity put her hand to her forehead, then pinched the bridge of her nose just above her glasses. “You’d better come inside.”

She’d never had Loki over to her place before– she’d never actually had the chance; he always beat her to the invite, almost overeager to play the role of obliging host. She was a bit surprised that he even knew which apartment was hers (even though it was just downstairs). As he carefully stepped through the doorway, he looked so hesitant that she thought for a moment that he might bounce off the threshold like an uninvited vampire. 

But he made his way into the living room without incident, standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. “Sit,” she said helplessly, and went to the kitchen. She was hoping that she had something normal in the fridge, although she’d been moping around quite a bit lately and hadn’t really gone to the food store in a while.

Eventually she came back out into the living room, where Loki was sitting on her couch, staring wearily at his hands. Verity stood in front him without saying a word, waiting, until he finally, finally had to drag his gaze up to look at her. “Here,” she said, holding out a glass. The only relatively drinkable thing she’d had was vodka and Sprite, and there hadn’t been a whole lot of Sprite left in the bottle; but he looked like he needed a drink and she had a feeling she was going to need one.

He took the glass out of her hand, and Verity half expected him to look back at the floor. Instead, he was looking at her like he was drowning. She wasn’t sure if she could be a lifeboat, but she sure as hell couldn’t stand to watch him sink any further. “What happened?” she finally said. “Why are you suddenly not…”

She couldn’t think how to finish that sentence in a way that wasn’t wildly insulting, because he had seriously been a complete jackass when she’d last seen him. He didn’t seem to need her to spell it out. “I was good,” he said, as if that explained anything. “There was a battle, and there was a spell, and all who were good became evil, and all who were evil became good.”

Oh. “You’re not evil,” she said. “And you weren’t good. You were an asshole.” She regretted the insult as soon as it left her mouth, but it was true. “You thought you were being all heroic, but you were seriously not.”

Weirdly, it was the last part that seemed to bother him the most. “But I was,” Loki said, wonderingly. He wasn’t looking at Verity anymore; he seemed to be seeing something far away. “Do you know what’s on the moon, Verity?”

“An American flag and some footprints?”

“My brother’s hammer. Mjolnir. Do you know what’s written on the side? You should. It’s part of the whole Thor mythos,” he said, almost conversationally, as though it had nothing to do with him at all. “It’s part of his legend. Like his nemesis, Loki, the God of Evil.” She hurried to interrupt, but he talked right over her. “It says, _whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.”_

“Sounds vaguely familiar,” Verity said, trying to figure out where this was going.

“If he be worthy,” Loki repeated, and turned back to Verity, something unidentifiable in his expression. “I was worthy. Just for a few minutes. Do you know how many times I tried to pick that damn thing up when we were younger? Centuries,” he said, and she shivered. He was silent a moment, then tilted his head to look her in the eye. “I picked it up like it was a toy,” he said in a low voice. “Swung it into the air like I’ve seen him do a hundred, a thousand times. I wasn’t Loki,” he said. “I wielded Mjolnir, I called upon lightning and upon Asgard, I was the _God of Thunder._ I was worthy,” he said again. “I was _good_. And then it _ended._ Do you know what you are if you’re not good, Verity?” His voice was filled with self-loathing. “Everyone knows the opposite of _good._ ”

He held Verity’s gaze for a moment, his eyes dark and angry, daring her to look away from the God of Evil. Except that she had once painted said God of Evil’s fingernails with pink glitter, when they were watching a movie and he wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing, and he hadn’t killed her or set her on fire or anything. Although he had turned her hair a matching glittery pink, which she didn’t realize until she got home; but he even turned it back after she called him and shouted at him for a while over his delighted laughter. Not terribly evil. 

Finally he looked away, back to studying her living room carpet, and Verity took a long sip of her drink, thinking.

“Except that what you were wasn’t good,” she eventually said. “I don’t know what criteria your brother’s magic hammer uses to determine ‘worthiness,’ but if it let you pick it up while you were under that spell, it was definitely not because of anything that spell did to you. Because you have been a better person, by far, the entire time that I have known you, than you were when you were sitting on your couch smugly telling me that I was a small, lesser mortal that your heroic self had no time for.” Loki winced. “Good. You should feel bad about saying that. It was mean, and selfish, and thoughtlessly hurtful. And you didn’t even care that you’d hurt me.”

“I did care,” he said, almost inaudibly. “I just told myself that there were more important things than that.”

“And that is why I’m telling you that you weren’t good,” she said. “Also there were highly inappropriate PDAs with Amora, which were way less than heroic.”

He actually cringed a little. “Please don’t remind me.”

“You didn’t seem to have a problem with her making kissy faces at you before,” Verity said, trying to tease him out of his mood a little. “She practically had hearts in her eyes.”

Loki winced. “Not the last time I saw her, she didn’t.”

“Breakup didn’t go well?”

“Amora is…” Loki paused, considering. “Not terribly forgiving.”

“So, what, did she try to turn you into a frog or something?”

“That probably would have been less painful,” he said, a trace of a smile ghosting across his face. “We… go back a long time. But we’ve parted on worse terms.”

Verity rolled her eyes. “She was already your ex?” Loki had the grace to look embarrassed, which Verity felt gave her every right to laugh at his sheepish expression. “Bet that all ended well.”

“Yes, well, she always liked my brother better,” Loki said, and Verity watched his face fall as it all crashed back down on him: brother, hammer, worthy. “Who can blame her?”

Verity took a sip of her drink and stared into the glass for a moment. She was seriously not equipped to deal with existential crises of faith, of metaphysical dilemmas of the nature of good versus evil – it was all almost as hard to deal with as fiction was, and thus something that she had thoroughly managed to avoid until now.

But Loki was her friend, and Verity didn’t have enough of those that she could kick him back out her front door. “Hawaiian?”

He looked up from picking at his nail polish, head tilted. “What?”

“Hawaiian? Pizza. I’ll call and order – I’ll even call the place you like, with the zeppoles.”

“The _good_ zeppoles?”

“The _good_ zeppoles.”

There was a long pause before Loki spoke. “Why?”

“Well, you like zeppoles.”

“No. Why? Why would you tell me to come in, and order pizza, and try to cheer me up?” His face looked as though something within him was torn in two. “Why? You know who I am. I’ve told you who I’m going to be. Why would you even bother?”

Verity just looked at him, watching his expression shift between misery and genuine confusion. “Because you’re my friend, dumbass,” she said, and Loki raised an eyebrow. “Now. Hawaiian?” He nodded. “Good. Now go upstairs and take a shower. Put on some clothes that don’t make you look like a boy band member who fell in a mud puddle. And then come back down here, and we will watch tv and eat pizza. And zeppoles.”

“Yes ma’am,” Loki said. He wasn’t quite smiling, but he didn’t look nearly as utterly despondent. “You do know you are ordering around a god, here. Actual deity.”

“Yep.” Verity picked up her phone off the coffee table. “I know. And can the actual deity please bring something decent back here to drink? This Sprite is flat. And I know what your liquor cabinet and wine rack look like.”

Loki touched two fingers to his brow in salute. “Check. Red wine. Will do. I have a great Syrah you’ll love,” he said, standing and heading for the door as Verity scrolled through her phone to the pizza delivery place. “It tastes like bacon!” he called back, over his shoulder, as he pulled the door shut.

Verity shook her head and huffed out a laugh. She’d missed him and his ridiculousness. God of Evil, pfft, she thought. God of bullshit, maybe. Or bacon. What Loki really needed, rather than yet another overblown title, was a therapist and a whole lot of space from his dysfunctional family. Verity was pretty sure he was screwed on both of those counts; but whatever bacon grease was about to hit the fire, she wasn’t going to leave him to burn.


End file.
